My latest Korea Times piece is on how the three leading candidates can win the upcoming presidential election.
The set up:
The current presidential election was starting to look like Lee Myung-bak’s victory lap after the “real” contest for the main opposition Grand National Party (GNP) nomination.
Like most observers of Korean politics, I kept expecting Chung Dong-young to eventually close the gap between Lee and himself in the polls. Chung did get a bit of a boost after he secured the United New Democratic Party nomination but Lee’s numbers showed no signs of dropping below 40 percent.
Even the inevitable scandal (real or manufactured) failed to mix things up. Each supposed revelation about Lee regarding the ongoing “BBK” case seemed to be greeted by a collective yawn from the electorate and Lee continued to enjoy broad support on the way to what looked like certain victory.
In short, the presidential race was in danger of getting boring.
Lee Hoi-chang’s Entry
The former GNP chairman is a 72-year-old hard-line conservative with a wooden personality who has lost the last two presidential elections. That does not sound like the kind of person who would shake things up, but he has done just that.
Lee Hoi-chang’s entry into the presidential field has upset the established dynamic of the race. It has also raised a number of intriguing election scenarios.
Read the rest to see what those scenarios are.
BTW, I first submitted this piece about ten days ago but it somehow got lost in the KT email system, so parts of it are a little dated.
3 Comments
What is your take on the lack of involvement by the netizens? Are they really being that quiet? Has the press decided not to trumpet their activities since that gave Roh the victory in 2002? Why are they not lining up behind Chung like they did Roh?
Nice to see that it isn’t only Marmot’s Hole visitors who aren’t exactly obsessed with the election. It would appear, if one were to look at Koreans’ top internet searches over the past few weeks as an indicator, that most of them don’t care all that much about the outcome and/or assume the election is a done deal.
As someone who thinks about the election just about every day, the lack of excitment seems strange.
The Internet is no longer new and it certainly is not a revolution. The political professionals were caught off guard in 2002. Now they have largely taken over the Internet campaigns. We are seeing the same thing starting to happen in the States (If memory serves, Obama took a web site away from a rabid supporter of his earlier this year in order to have more control over content.).
Also, conservatives were way behind progressives in Korea on the net in 2002 while they have at least caught up this year, so Internet campaigning is no longer as decisive.
As for Chung’s lack of support, it seems that the left has been left demoralized by the Roh administration (as many conservatives in the USA are by the Bush administration). Also, Chung has so far not shown any ability to fire up the base.